Drama Archive

“Everyone” watched “Succession”— but was it a success? - A few days after the final episode of “Succession,” I asked a culturally savvy, critically astute friend what she thought of it. She hadn’t watched it.  More surprising, she’d never

“The Wife” - “The Wife” got enthusiastic reviews (The Times: “pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and

“Zero Dark Thirty” - UPDATE: After writing this, I saw ZERO DARK THIRTY. (I didn't pay. The studio sent me a DVD.) The torture scenes are, I think, deliberately ambiguous. Not

A Face in the Crowd - A story from a simpler time, when a guy could get his start as a media god... in jail. We meet Lonesome Rhodes when he’s a drifter doing short time in

A Late Quartet - The title is a double entendre. The music that anchors the film is Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, opus 131. Half an hour long, played straight through, it is a bold,

Academy Awards Special: Jessica Chastain cheered Tammy Faye Bakker’s “radical acts of love.” When I profiled the Bakkers for Vanity Fair, I may have met another Tammy Faye. Here’s my piece… - For 99.99% of Oscar viewers, the takeaway moment was Will Smith bitch-slapping Chris Rock. I may have been among a tiny minority of viewers who were also struck by Jessica

After Paris: a reading/viewing list - Think back, please, to the weeks immediately following 9/11. In New York, they were quiet, contemplative, even profound. Eager to understand why it happened, many of us read Ahmed

After the Wedding - Americans are lucky. We’re spared war and famine and apocalyptic weather. What we’re not spared is a crazed white man with a gun who needs to kill 18 people before

Alexander Nevsky - The greatest score in all of film --- so good that it inspired John Williams' shark theme in “Jaws” and James Horner's music for “Star Trek II:

Alfred Hitchcock: Foreign Correspondent - You may have noticed that we are witnessing the absolute low point of the American media in our lifetime. Reporting is ignored, only punditry matters. And the pundits, en masse,

Amadeus -     February 27, 2006: Mozart's 250th birthday. He's looking good for someone his

Arlington Road - Noon. A suburb of Washington, DC, a street dotted with houses just a shade too small to be McMansions. No one is around. Wait --- here comes someone. A boy. White,

Asghar Farhadi: Three Remarkable Films - Only a handful of directors have won the Best Foreign Film Oscar more than once: Vittorio de Sica and Federico Fellini (four times each), Ingmar Bergman (three times), and René

Bad Day at Black Rock - So there I was, an unworldly teenager incarcerated at a prep school in the mid-50s, surrounded by a cluster of sophisticated, condescending, rich teenagers, wise in many subtle ways, as only

Bang the Drum Slowly - I’m a sucker for author questionnaires, and Shelf Awareness --- a daily newsletter for the bookstore crowd --- has a great one. Your five favorite books. The book that changed

Battle of Algiers - Almost every war movie stacks the deck. Enemy soldiers wear dark clothes, are unshaven, speak in accents and die in large numbers at the end. Heroes are

Beatriz at Dinner - Mike White created “White Lotus,” the hugely popular series (ten Primetime Emmys and two Golden Globes) that’s funny, frothy, and takes viewers to pretty locations (Maui, Sicily, and, coming up,

Before Sunrise/Before Sunset - Guest Butler Marc Cutillo is a graphic designer for Design 446 in Manasquan, New Jersey. Videos Before Sunrise Before Sunset I've come to praise one of the greatest love stories ever told. Back in 1996,

Before the Oscars: 5 better 2018 films you can see at home right now - So there’s this moment in “Green Book. ” Tony --- a white, dees-and-dems New Yorker --- is driving Don --- a black, gay, classical pianist --- to a series of

Bill Nighy - “Living” stars Bill Nighy, who is never not flawless. The reviews are exceptional.  Do, please, watch the trailer, and you’ll see the appeal of a film about an inhibited, buttoned-up